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The Digital Guardian

Christmas is coming a tad bit early for fans of history and journalism, for it has just been announced that TheGuardian has digitized its entire massive archive. And for a few days next month, it's offering everyone in the world free access to two centuries' worth of its pages.

The Guardian - along with its Sunday edition, the Observer - will be text-searchable. In an instant, you'll be able to read whatever it's ever covered since it was founded in Manchester, England in 1821. The Observer dates back to 1791! At various times it has also run pieces from the Washington Post as well as translations of articles from Le Monde.

According to the announcement, the first phase of the Guardian News & Media archive, containing the Guardian from 1821 to 1975 and the Observer from 1900 to 1975, will launch on November 3. The website is not yet working now.

"Readers will be offered free 24-hour access during November, but after this trial period charging will be introduced," it was announced. "The rest of the archive will launch early in 2008, making more than 1.2m pages of digitised news content available, with Observer content available from its launch as the world's first Sunday newspaper in 1791."

I already have a list started of the articles I want to find. What do you want to read from the pages of the past? If I'm not the only one thrilled by the availability of this resource, I'll remind you when the freebie day comes.

Comments

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'The Grauniad' (because of the amount of spelling errors it used to have in the pre-digital printing days) as it is readers fondly refer to it in the UK, is probably the best broadsheet we have. It is an excellent paper.

NewspaperArchiveMy most very favorite site on the internet. Millions of digitized, text-searchable newspapers from across the U.S. and the world. If my computer somehow froze up and I had access to only one website, this would be it.

Paper of Record Another pay-to-play website that features searchable historic newspapers. Canada is particularly well represented in its collection.